As one of our users pointed out, Kerika’s Views — What’s Assigned to Me, What Got Done, etc. — shouldn’t include any cards from templates, just regular boards.

People who use templates on a regular basis often pre-assign cards in the template: for example, an employee on-boarding template that involves HR tasks may be preassigned to a specific HR employee.

Our initial implementation of Views included cards from Templates as well, which led to a misleading impression of the amount of work, particularly unscheduled work, that was waiting for a particular person.

We offer a small selection of templates, covering a wide range of possible projects, to help our users get started with new boards — and, more importantly, to help introduce the concept of templates to folks.

We experienced some performance issues related to these templates recently which we have fixed: as the total number of Kerika users grew, the number of people wanting to use the same templates grew somewhat faster than we had anticipated, so we needed to make some back-end fixes to make sure there wasn’t a slowdown in performance.

We are adding “In Progress” as a new status tag for cards, on Task Boards and Scrum Boards, that we think will make it easier for everyone to see which items are actually moving along.

In Progress

Couple of reasons why we did this:

People get assigned too many cards sometimes, even when they are working with a “Pull” model (as opposed to “Push”), sometimes even using Work-in-Progress (WIP) Limits don’t solve the problem of easily seeing exactly what’s being worked on at any time.

In this process template, we have three buckets of activities: Background Check, IT & Facilities Setup, and Onboarding, and we have a separate In Progress column that you could use to indicate which card is currently in progress.

But, with a “In Progress” status indicator on cards, you wouldn’t need that extra column: you could work on cards from any of those three buckets and indicate their status right there. And when the work gets completed, these cards can go straight to Done!